If you are wanting more from your team, you can either make excuses for them or you can create solutions to get better results.
Discover what may be holding them back, and learn how get the most out of your team:
Continue reading for full transcript
How to get more out of your team. More on that coming up next.
Welcome to the Chris LoCurto show where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.
Welcome to the show folks. Uh, this last July, especially to college football fans, but this isn’t about college football. Uh, but this last July they had a media days, um, for college football coaches as they looked ahead to the season happening right now. The one that they’re in right now and someone everyone likes to hear from is Nick Saban. It’s understandably so, right? So if you’re not a sports fan, Nick Saban has won six national championships now and his team, and is considered by many as the best college coach of all time. And yet his team got walloped 44 to 16 in the last year’s championship game. Now here is what was interesting at the media days, Saban kept getting asked what happened… And a lot of things were said, but you can summarize it by him essentially saying they didn’t get enough out of their team.
Now there were several reasons given and, and you know we’re actually going to dive into some of them in our episode today, but here is what I want to point out. Even the best college football coach in history sometimes doesn’t get everything he wants from his team. So if you are in the spot where you really are wanting more from your team, it doesn’t mean you are a bad leader or there’s things that are going poorly. Here’s the tough thing though, no matter where you are as a leader, when you’re not getting everything you want from your team, you can either have excuses or you can have solutions, but you can’t have both. Well we do here you can, but the excuses are never going to help you, right? So as we do here, our goal is what’s the solution? How do we solve this thing?
So to get more out of your team, a few things need to happen. The first thing that you’ve got to do is you, let me say that again, you have to discover what’s holding them back. So many times in leadership, we’ve not been taught the very things I’m about to teach you and therefore we don’t know or we aren’t proactive in discovering what’s holding our team back. We just expect it of them. Why? Because most of us came from leaders somewhere in our lives who just expected us to solve the things that were holding us back. Right? I’m going to tell you ,as a leader, it’s your job to make your team successful, not the other way around. So you’ve got to discover what’s holding them back. Now, you don’t want to be the leader who runs around frantically, like, you know, they’re really busy but never really improving anything.
Some leaders want more out of their team, but they don’t know how to get the best results. So they just start doing a lot of things. They set more aggressive goals, they change up the office set up based on the latest book or trend, which that is happening a lot right now. They add a new core value to their culture about hard work and just hope that everybody starts to follow it. They increase accountability measures, but then they don’t actually hold people accountable to those measures. You know, the list can go on and on. While this can sometimes make leaders feel better because new things are being done, it doesn’t mean that the team and the business are actually getting better. You have to truly assess the issue at hand. So here’s some ways that you can do that, and this is a short list, but here’s some things that you can do right away.
Get a lot of feedback from the team. Don’t talk, don’t get defensive, don’t explain things. Now again, as we’re talking through this, there’s a caveat that I’m going to give to you and the caveat is that we need to be doing this in a very healthy way. So ask a lot of questions and listen. Listen to what they’re saying. One of the things that we do, and I’ve talked about it many times is the one on one meetings. That’s a big piece of doing this. When you sit down and one on one and talk through with a team member and ask them what’s going on, what, what are they experiencing? How could you be a better leader? If you have leaders under you, how could that leader be a better leader? What are they experiencing in their roles? And just discovering, you know, what they could do better.
You know, do you feel like you have all the tools you need? Do you understand everything that you’re supposed to be doing in your role? Get feedback, talk to them, get information, get some outside eyes on your business that can help you to see what you don’t see. So one of the great things that we do here is that we help all of the leaders that are coming in to see things from an outside perspective. We can look in while they’re, you know, really blinkered in there and what they’re able to see. We can see things from an outside perspective. And we’re coming from a healthier aspect or healthier perspective than some people might, right? So get healthy people to give you an outside view of your business. Another thing you can do is get some time away to break out of the day to day, to step back and really examine what’s going on.
So to help you get started, I’m going to share some common areas, work team struggle. But before I do that, I want to tell you about one of my favorite things that we do here at The Poimen Group. Next level life is our two day personal discovery experience. It’s a one on one personalized event where we guide you through a process to help you discover your root system, to get unstuck in life and to discover what’s holding you back from freedom and peace. Imagine this, what if you could wake up every morning with a clear purpose? What would it look like to have healthier relationships with less conflict? Where would you be in a few months, a year, five years if you had clarity, purpose and peace? Probably a big difference from where you stand today. Now I know it’s possible because I’ve been where you are asking myself, is there more?
There is and there is a better way and it starts with next level life. You can go to Chris LoCurto.com/Discover to take the next step. Now, if you’re struggling with this contentment, regret, or not feeling good enough, which most of you are, if you’re filled with anxiety or your relationships are lacking, don’t keep going through the same motions every single day. Learn how to move past the things, robbing you of peace. All right, so we’re talking about some common areas where your team or teams can struggles. Now these examples may give you insight into what’s holding your team back so that you can get more from them. Number one, and you’re always going to hear me say this, the number one struggle at a business has that a team has that individuals have is they struggle in communication.
Now, if you want a successful team, you must lead them based on their personality styles. Your leaders must, your team must know how to lean in each other’s directions. They need to be led according to their personality style, not necessarily how they want to be led. Some folks would love to be led in a way that allows them the negative sides of their personality styles. And as I’m talking about personality styles, if you’ve, if you’re brand spanking new to the show, I’m talking about like disc personality styles of, of understanding how people act, react, give information, receive information. So if you have a diverse team, then how you act and react is different than how they act and react to your leadership, right? Unless you hired people exactly like you, chances are they’re going to respond differently. They’re going to receive information differently. They’re going to respond to things that you’ve said differently.
So that’s why we make sure that everybody understands their personality styles. So you need to know how to lead each personality style on your team successfully, right? If you have leaders below you, you need to be teaching them how to lead each personality style. You need to be teaching your team how to work with each other. All of these things are going to help your team to communicate at a much higher level. What I’m looking for is high levels of quality communication. The greater the communication inside of your business, the less people are going to struggle, the more that they’re gonna win together as a team, not just as individuals, but they will be able to move together as a team. The more productive they’re going to be. When people cannot communicate well together, then guess what? It slows down their productivity. If people don’t understand how to communicate with each other, if noticing that people sometimes struggle with their communication or somebody just appears to be a total jerk because they, you know, won’t lean in somebody else’s direction, that’s because they don’t understand how to do this.
The funny thing is, is we make these assumptions that how people are by not understanding their personality styles and then when we learn their personality styles, all of a sudden we go, Oh, that’s why they’re that way. Oh, okay. So I just need to adjust how I speak to them. So make sure each personality style, each person is learning personality styles, how to communicate with them that your leaders are leading that. And the amazing thing is that you’re gonna find that you get way greater productivity. It’s also going to be the thing that helps you knowing the type of personality style you’re speaking to on how to get information from them, how to ask them the right questions to get the right results. Number two, they struggle with motivation. A lot of times you’re going to have folks, if they do not see that the thing that they are doing is bigger than themselves, that they’re helping people to grow, that they’re changing people’s lives, that they’re affecting people in a positive way than the most positive thing they will show up is for the paycheck.
Now, if they are showing up for just the paycheck, then I can promise you you’re paying twice the amount for the role because they are doing half of their productivity. They’re doing only the amount they need to to get that paycheck right, because they’re not seeing that this is an important why. The moment they can understand that it has a much greater purpose and it actually feeds into their fulfillment and them having purpose, that’s when they really start to work harder for that why. So make sure that they understand what is the purpose of the company, what is the mission of your company? And for me, mission is your purpose for existing. So you should be teaching your team what the purpose of the business existence is and how they fit into that and how they align with that. Also, make sure that they can see the vision, the destination of where the company is heading next.
I’m not saying they need to see this 10 year goal, which that’s not a bad thing. They need to see where they’re going next. They need to know where they’re headed and how they, how they can contribute to actually making that successful. Number three, they struggle with accountability. There is no doubt about it especially nowadays. Business today is so different, than it was even 20 years ago. One of the big things that we are lacking in businesses massively is quality accountability. So let’s take KRAs for example. If you don’t have the key result areas, which is not a job description, this is helping your team to see what is the result that they should be accomplishing. Then they don’t have the clarity of what expectation is. What they do have clarity on most likely is the job description. Do these tasks. The problem is that leaves a big gap.
We call it the task result gap. If they can’t see what the expected result is and they can’t understand that, then guess what? They’re going to struggle with it. They’ll get the task done and you might be coming back and going, Hey, you’re not getting this thing done. And I’m like, yeah, these are all the things you told me to do. I did all those. Yeah, but it’s supposed to look like this. Well, you didn’t tell me that. You told me these pieces. That becomes a big lack of accountability inside of the business. And that’s why we’re always pushing our leaders to make sure that they’re putting KRAs in place. So make sure that you’re looking for the rhythms of accountability inside of your business to make sure that it’s, that it’s being executed on and it’s, and it’s happening at a high level. If it’s not, then what in the world do you hold people accountable to?
How can you expect great results from them? If the only thing you can hold them accountable to is the tasks that you told them to do right, and they don’t see the result. So make sure that you’re holding them accountable in all areas, no matter what it is, whether it’s communication, whether it’s showing up on time, whether it’s reporting well, whether it’s following their metrics well, whether it’s communicating with clients well, whatever that is, make sure that you’re putting those in place. So question for you. Does your team struggle in any of these three areas, whether it’s communication or accountability or motivation? These are the key areas where most teams struggle. So before we get to what to do when you find the thing holding your team back are the things I want to talk about. Our next level leadership live event where we will be doing a deep dive for two and a half days of learning all the things that you can do and applying those things on.
Some of the things that we are talking about today. I’ve never seen a leader that’s had everything that they wanted. Out of thousands of leaders that I’ve coached most are probably a lot like you. You wish you saw greater productivity and less drama from your team that you didn’t spend your energy putting out fires, that you had more time to invest in your family and the things that you enjoy and you felt more equipped to lead your team to success. The only thing that’s holding leaders back from the results they desire is having the right tools and you can get those tools at the next level. Leadership live event. So if you’re young, old, new, experienced, struggling, or really successful, this event is for anyone who is ready to learn from 25 years of best practices that get proven results. It’s not about short term fixes.
In three days. I’m going to teach you how to have sustained revenue growth to generate greater productivity from your team and get immediate momentum toward the results that you want. It’s going to be detailed, practical in loaded with how tos from the lessons we’re teaching, our clients have seen an average of 46% increase in gross profit in one year’s time. That’s one year’s time. These clients run normal everyday businesses and your business can have the same level of success. So if you’re ready to see those results, go to chrislocurto.com/liveevent And get your tail to this event and invest in your leadership and your business. That’s crystal corto.com/events I can’t wait to see you there folks. You will get a game plan at the next level leadership live event that is in depth, but I want you to know how to have one right now.
So what you need to do is you need to create an execute a specific game plan. Now, once you’ve committed to not just trying to blindly fix everything and you’ve discovered what is really holding you or your team back, you need to create a specific game plan to fix the problem. So here’s how I would do that. First thing you need to do is sit down with your leaders. If you’ve got leaders on your team as well, then let’s sit down and make sure that you’re all on the same page about what the problem actually is. So gain perspective of leadership on what needs to be solved, what’s the things holding their team’s back or, or the team as a whole or certain individuals, whatever it is, make sure everyone is in agreement that it needs to be fixed so you can go forward, unified.
That’s the key. We have to be unified on solving these things. If we’re not, guess what guys? It’s just not gonna work. So depending upon the size of the issue, you may need the entire leadership team to help solve it. If it’s a small issue, you can probably just handle it. They can handle it in their teams individually. If it’s a larger problem, then guess what? We’re going to need to everybody on board, right? We’re going to have to solve this with everybody. Don’t gingerly solve the problem, right? Get it done, get it done. It’s holding you back. It’s holding your team back. Number two, identify the key deliverables that will let you know how you are doing in the area that needs to be improved. So create a dashboard, if you will, of those key indicators, those key deliverables to track and go over on a weekly basis with your leaders.
So if let’s say you’re trying to solve a, let me pick something easy, people showing up on time, then what are the things that we have to see? The key deliverable is we, somebody has got to be here making sure that everybody’s walking in the door at a proper time. If they are not, what do we do about it right? That’s a super small version of it. Let’s take it to a much larger version. Let’s take it to the communication side. If people are not communicating well, if we do not have high levels of quality communication, then we already know that it’s affecting our productivity. It’s affecting our clients. It’s affecting everything, right? It’s affecting our sales. It’s affecting the result that the client is getting. There’s all things that we know that it’s affecting. So you’re going to have to discover which areas are being held back.
How is communication not high level, how is it not high quality? And what are the things that we’re going to say… This is a deliverable we must see like greater customer satisfaction or, serving our teams in a timely manner to find out are they receiving information that they need? Are they, are people working with them? Whatever that thing is, or those things are, make sure you identify those key deliverables. If these deliverables have not happened, then we’ve not solved the problem. We’re not moving in that direction. Number three, make a goal that you want to see happen by the end of say, six months, that you would say, if we hit this goal, then we can with 100% confidence, say the issue will no longer be holding the team back. Now that doesn’t mean that you’ve stopped doing the thing. It just means that you’re doing it really well.
So it’s not holding the team back. So let’s go back to that communication piece. So let’s go to accountability. If we’re installing something like KRAs as a piece of accountability and there’s a hundred things you should be doing for accountability inside of your business. But let’s say that that’s something we’re putting in place. When can we say that the leaders are holding every single team member accountable to that KRA? What timeframe? Six months. If we say six months that we could say everybody, every KRA is being accomplished. People are doing a great job, they’re being successful, fantastic. This is no longer holding us back until we adjust a KRA or add a KRA or whatever. So, generally speaking, if we can say, we’ve done this really well, great, that’s not holding us back. We’re getting the results that we want. Number four, create weekly touch points for your entire team on the progress being made.
So there’s clarity on whether or not you’re on track to hit your goal. Right? And when I say weekly touch points, what I’m talking about is getting reports on how we’re doing or discovering mistakes and owning those mistakes or coming up with new ideas on how to better improve the area that we’re addressing. So if we’re putting something in place and it’s not going well, why not? We need to be on that quickly. Don’t just put something in place and then wait for three months to find out if it worked out. Get in there, discover if it’s not working out. Do something different. Number five, survey the team and find out how things are going with the specific issue or issues that was being solved, right? Or that was solved. If we, if we say we solved this in six months, then how do we make sure it doesn’t come back to bite us in the butt?
Right? Continue that communication. Survey the team, see how things are going. See if anything’s changed. Who knows? We might’ve had an injection of bad culture through hires or something like that, that has jacked up the process again. Or maybe we got overwhelmed with work or something like that. And you know, we’re stuck in the leadership crazy cycle following up, back into old routines. So make sure that you’re also following up, checking to see how things are going, optimize it, solve it. Do whatever you need to do. So you might be thinking, wow, this sounds great, Chris, but how am I going to remember all of this? Well, I have made it so you don’t have to. We have a download for you for this episode that will outline the steps on how to create an execute the game plan, so that once you have identified the issue, you have a playbook ready for you to use.
Now you can get that at Chris LoCurto.com/346 Use this information guys. This is stuff you can do right now and if you would like a much bigger game plan, make sure that you join us at the Next Level Leadership LIVE Event. Well folks, hopefully this has helped you today. Thank you for joining me. I hope it has served you well. I encourage you to subscribe to rate and to share the podcast, to help more people join our community and as always, take this information, change your leadership, change your business, change your life, and join us on the next episode.
